When it rains...It totally pours!!

Well, today I took Vilate to the ENT (Ears, Nose and Throat specialist). The poor kid has had 5 positive strep cultures since December. Last week she had her 5th one and her doc said that it was time to see about removing her tonsils. I didn't mention to her that they might do that, I just said that we were meeting with a specialist to see how we can stop her from getting strep throat again. The doctor, who was amazingly nice, came in and looked at her throat. She said her tonsils don't look too big, but with that many positive tests, we should remove the darn things. Vilate FREAKED out - she started crying and jumped down from the chair and ran over and sat on my lap, begging me to tell her that we would not take her tonsils out. Then the doctor proceeded to tell us that not only did she need her stupid tonsils out but that she has nodes on her vocal chords and needs speech therapy and behavior modification so that they can go away! WHAT?!?!?!?!? All I wanted was to STOP STREP THROAT!! Then as we are leaving the doc says that she will take a picture of them while Vilate is sleeping during the surgery so that we can show them to the speech therapist. To which Vilate says, "You mean I will just be sleeping during the surgery?" The poor kid spent all that time thinking that she would have to endure them scraping out her tonsils WIDE AWAKE!!! No wonder she was so scared.

I have talked to the speech therapist at school and she said that we need to get Vilate to stop yelling...yeah, good luck with that one! She said that speech therapy is not really going to help, but the behavior modification is where we need to focus. So, Vilate has been trying sooooooo hard to not yell this afternoon and she has done a stellar job. We shall see how this progresses.....

All afternoon Vilate has been asking questions about the surgery...."What if I wake up in the middle of it?" or "How do they know how much medicine to give me to keep me asleep?" and "How will they give me more medicine while I am asleep if they need to?" The poor kid is trying to be brave and she finally came up to me and said, "Mom, why couldn't they just have told you about the surgery and then you could have told me later, when it was better for me?" GOOD QUESTION!!!!

So, now I will endure the endless questions and scenerios that her 6 year old brain will come up with until they finally call to schedule the surgery. Apparently they book 6 - 8 weeks out. Ohhhhhhhhhhh this is gonna be a long 2 months!!!